


On The Derivation Of Just Powers

by ultimaromanorum



Category: Original Work
Genre: graecum est non potest legere, gratuitous classics, mad political science, the author is dead
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-02-07
Updated: 2018-02-12
Packaged: 2018-09-22 17:09:41
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,271
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9617228
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ultimaromanorum/pseuds/ultimaromanorum





	1. Death of the Author

οὐ γὰρ οἱ ἄρχοντες ἄλλων, ὥσπερ καὶ Λακεδαιμόνιοι, οὗτοι δεινοὶ τοῖς νικηθεῖσιν, ἔστι δὲ οὐ πρὸς Λακεδαιμονίους ἡμῖν ὁ ἀγών, ἀλλ᾽ ἢν οἱ ὑπήκοοί που τῶν ἀρξάντων αὐτοὶ ἐπιθέμενοι κρατήσωσιν.  
Thucydides, _History of the Peloponnesian Wars_ 5.91

I

If you could only shut up, you would fall down fewer stairs, Luca Alunni told himself as he slipped on ancient pitted marble, barking a knee for the second time in less than an hour. The guard beside him yelped and grabbed him by the collar with one hand as she clung to the spine of the narrow spiral staircase with the other. You would at the very least have your hands free to catch yourself if you could shut up, he told himself as the guard hauled him upright. They might have given you time to put on shoes. You’re going to shut up. It’s what her Excellency doesn’t want, for once, so you’ll also be shutting up so as not to give her what she wants.

At the head of the staircase was a small iron-bound door dominated by a monumental brass knocker in the form of a swan locked in mortal struggle with a large octopus. Luca squinted at the individually-sculpted suckers on the octopus’s brass tentacles as the guard rapped twice on the door with it and then pushed it open without waiting for an answer. He stumbled over the threshold as he was pushed into a brightly-lit frescoed room. Her Excellency Generalissima Phebe Delali, President-for-Life and Savior of the Republic, was wedged snugly in the furthermost corner of a well-worn leather armchair in the furthermost corner of the office, peering irritably over a steaming teacup garlanded with painted oak leaves strung between finely detailed bucrania. In the saucer was a half-eaten marzipan candy, shaped incongruously like a garlic bulb. A breeze from the balcony window left behind a meandering trail of rosemary through the room’s miasma of bergamot and old files. The generalissima made a vague gesture towards him, which was followed promptly by the blow of a boot heel to the back of his knee and then a bone-jarring thud as his already battered shins connected with the parquet floor.

“Captain Santini. It’s past three. I’m in my pajamas.”

“Snatch squad, ma’am, running behind schedule as usual. Said they ran into no end of trouble at that pasta-maker’s shop, you know, just off the piazza near the bridge, and then—”

The generalissima leaned forward, trying to nudge a fuzzy white slipper discreetly out of sight beneath the chair with her foot. She was still in thick olive-drab cotton socks, as if she had only just pried her boots off for the evening. “All right all right. It wasn’t you. Fine. I suppose I’m going to have to purge somebody tomorrow, if that’s still the correct euphemism. I’ve forgotten. Anyway don’t standing orders say you’re supposed to allow me fifteen minutes’ notice before you bring someone up?”

“Sorry, ma’am. Snatch said they phoned it in from his flat.”

“Well no one told me. At least they do seem to have picked up the right person this time.” The generalissima got up. “We’ll worry about all that in the morning.”

She set the teacup down on a side table piled high with files and shuffled over to loom down at him as Captain Santini slowly twined a hand into his hair and then abruptly yanked his head back. Now he was looking past the top of the generalissima’s head at the fresco, where a severed head stared back at him through clouded eyes while an aquiline woman in a stolla stabbed a hairpin through its tongue. The sickly texture of the captain’s leather glove against his hair sent a spidery sensation crawling down the back of his neck, and he shuddered.

“I can’t tell what exactly it is you think you’re playing at, Dr. Alunni. I can’t imagine that you mean to legitimize my regime, based on everything else you’ve ever written, but that seems to be the consensus interpretation, and anyway the insurrectionary reading isn’t precisely obvious at face value.”

“The insurrectionary— just to be clear, we are talking about last week’s pamphlet?”

“Yes of course we’re bloody well talking about last week’s pamphlet,” she bellowed, and Luca flinched. She sighed, fishing in the pocket of her shabby bottle-blue velvet dressing gown. “I don’t know where you keep finding publishing facilities for this stuff. I swear we close one down every other day.”

“I thought it would be noncontroversial.”

“It’s apparently neutral. I can’t imagine anything worse.” She turned back the card cover of a small thin book and shoved it under his nose. “Besides which, it’s dedicated to me. I am now forced to take an interest, no?”

Shut up, idiot. “If you want to talk about it, you could have just called. I have office hours. Or we could have gotten a coffee or something.” He tried to picture such a meeting, at the little sidewalk café across from the courthouse. The generalissima was sipping an espresso and gnawing on a marzipan garlic bulb. He was tied to his chair. “This is gratuitous.”

“On the contrary. Think of it as political philosophy carried on by other means.” She waved her hand and the guard let go of his head. He glanced quickly at the frescoes to either side. On the left, what he had taken at first for a perfectly tranquil pastoral scene was marred by slight water damage and an assassin in legionary armor attacking a togaed man in a sedan chair, who seemed to be the original owner of the head. On the wall to his right, the man in the toga was haranguing an assembly gathered in a richly-tiled polychrome marble hall.

“Don’t Clausewitz me.” Shut up. “All I meant to do was clear up some sloppy logic one sees regarding the consent of the governed.” That was the opposite of shutting up.

“But you said—”

“Please. No one is accusing you of being one of the leaders of the free world. No— listen— what I mean to say is that consent of the governed is much fuzzier than various Americans I might mention would have you believe. It isn’t any sort of great ideal; it’s just the bare minimum required for any sort of remotely functional state. Renan was talking about territorial integrity but the point about _le plébiscite de tous les jours_ applies just as well to governments. If you really lacked consent, I don’t expect you’d be here to indulge in the spectacle of various annoying but otherwise harmless scribblers bound and kneeling on your sixteenth century parquet floor, to which, incidentally, the scribblers do not consent, even if the people may have done so on their behalf. Very nice, by the way, excellent patina.”

“Thanks.”

Somewhere behind him there was a brief slithering noise, but Luca was by now too overwhelmed in dizzy, prolix defiance to take any notice of it. “Of course the people wouldn’t see it that way, they’d tell me you’re essentially Satan incarnate, the Whore of Babylon, perhaps, but the trains and etc, but but but but. It’s all in the buts. All just chatter. If they were serious about withdrawing consent you’d have the pitchfork mob crawling all over this place ruining the varnish inside twenty-four hours.”

She narrowed her eyes. “Am I the Whore of Babylon?”

“I’m a classicist, not an theologian. You tell me.” Luca lurched as he made a reflexive move towards smoothing his hair back down. "All this is hardly original, anyway. Sabine makes the same point somewhere. Anyway I think it's Sabine."

“So which is it, then? The insurrectionist interpretation or the now-with-added-legitimacy one?”

“Is _Il Principe_ advice or satire?”

“Don’t deflect.”

“I’m not deflecting. You've heard of something called death of the author?”

The generalissima nodded, at him, he thought, until his head was wrenched back again by a gloved hand cupping his chin and he felt the fine edge of the captain’s apparently not so ceremonial sabre pressed against his throat.

“I don’t know what else I was expecting,” he whispered.

“I can’t hear you. Speak up.”

“The critic’s intent supersedes the author’s.”

“How apparently deferential,” sneered the generalissima. “I don’t think I like either of them, actually. The insurrectionist one is obviously inexcusable but of course the implication of the other is that I require some sort of popular legitimacy and secretly work to maintain it. You can see where I might find this unacceptable.”

Luca heard his own voice at a distance. “As you may suspect from the dedication, I did write it to annoy you in particular.”

“Do you have a death wish, Alunni?”

“I really couldn’t say.”

The generalissima turned away and walked slowly back toward the chair. “So who’s the new publisher?”

“Mr Outis. A Greek.”

“Tell me a new one,” she said after a pause, sweeping the tails of her dressing gown back as she sat down in the armchair more theatrically than was necessary. She jerked her head slightly to the side, coughed, jerked her head again, and finally sighed. “Dammit, Santini, take the sword away. He’s clamming up. Who’s the publisher?”

“I don’t know his name. I’ve never even seen him. We call that operational security. Look, if you let the captain cut my throat, as I’m sure she would very much like, you wouldn’t have this problem anymore.”

“Yes,” snapped the generalissima, “I would, because Mr Outis and Miss La-Ahad and their host of insolently pseudonymous collaborators would certainly go on publishing your wretched pamphlets, which would sell far more like hotcakes were I so foolish as to have you killed. And I would have a nasty stain on the parquet. Anyway it’s past my bedtime.”

“I should be getting home as well. I think I may have left the kettle on.”

The generalissima leaned back, pinching the bridge of her nose delicately. “Look, Alunni, you and I both know I can tolerate a certain amount of low-level dissent within certain bounds. It gives people something to do, gets them out of doors in the fresh air, and it’s good for propaganda. What I absolutely will not tolerate is apparently neutral attempts to provoke discussion. I thought that had been made quite clear after the whole Sophocles incident. Santini, have you understood any of this?”

“Only the bit about the publisher, ma’am.”

“Good. Your watch ends at four, yes?”

“That’s right, ma’am.”

“Well then, the faster you make him pick one the sooner you can go to bed.”

 

II

“She doesn’t wear the hat, Nonna.”

It was early and the empty street in the harbor district was still in shadow, but at the sound of voices a curtain twitched in an upper window across from an old yellow house with a grimy white cornice sculpted from plaster and sleeping pigeons. Luca lay in an untidy heap at the foot of the front steps like something left on the mat by an overgrown housecat, looking up at his landlady.

“What? Come on, stand up.” Crocetta Farrugia clamped a stained meerschaum pipe in her teeth, pushed up the sleeves of her rusty black dress, and heaved Luca off the ground bodily.

“Untie my hands first,” he gasped.

She shook her head. “Not till you’re into the house.” she said around the pipe. “You’re not going to want to move afterward.”

“You think I want to move now?”

“Lie in the street and get run over by the milkman, then. See if I care.” She stepped round behind him as if to prod him up the stairs, but changed her mind.

“Is Zio here?”

“No, he left for his morning swim about fifteen minutes ago. What hat?”

“The hat! You know. Oversized peaked cap, too much scrambled egg on the brim?” Luca wobbled through the front hall and plunged unsteadily forward into the kitchen, catching himself on the edge of the table just in time.

Crocetta’s right hand shot out to stop a majolica vase full of asphodel and lavender from toppling onto the doily while her left yanked a battered seat cushion off one of the kitchen chairs. She set it on the floor and flung a dish towel over it. “Go on, lay down on the floor. Facedown, right there on the cushion.”

“It’s the standard dictator hat,” mumbled Luca as she helped him down and began working at the knot in the bloodstained rope. “Goes with the jackboots and the jodphurs. She has the jackboots and the jodphurs but she doesn’t wear the hat— oh god.” He bit down hard on a mouthful of stripey red dish towel as she twitched the cord loose and slowly lowered his hands to the floor.

He moved to turn himself onto his side but thought better of it as the crushing pressure of full circulation returning to his hands turned the world a nauseating maroon. “She must have chosen that room for her office on purpose. To scare diplomats or something.”

Crocetta heaved a kettle onto the stove. “What room?”

“Her office. It has these ghastly frescoes of the last days of Cicero. I can’t imagine how she stands to look at them all day.”

“Obscene.” Crocetta pulled out a chair and fished a crochet hook and a half-finished sock out of her apron pocket. “What I don’t understand is how we can afford secret police but can’t afford to properly equip them. Just this morning I saw one picking up surveillance footage at the camera shop next to the bakery, and now I see they haven’t even been willing to invest in real handcuffs. They’d use an old lady’s hall curtain tieback for evil rather than spend a dime. This shirt is a lost cause. I’m going to have to cut it off you.”

Luca silently blessed the parsimony of the secret police in regard to handcuffs. “You should give them more credit. Maybe the camera seller’s in it too.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well how many negatives do you suppose go through that shop in a week? Anyway, why should it be surveillance footage? Even secret police have lives.” He’d run into Captain Santini yet again at the grocery last week. She was out of uniform and he hadn’t recognized her until she had turned and grinned wolfishly at him across the laundry detergent display. “Might have been family pictures.”

“So what did they want this time?”

“A clarification.”

“Did you give it to them?”

“No.”

“Why did they let you go?”

“Beats me.”

The kettle gave an abortive shriek as Crocetta removed it just on the verge of a boil. “You know one of these days you’re going to get the firing squad instead of just a flogging. Should I start advertising for a new tenant now or do you think it will be a while?”

“It’s a comfort to know that at bottom you’re still a mercenary old bat.”

“I would miss you, mind, but not as much as I’d miss your rent.”

“Send my bill to the secret police.” There was a sound of pouring and a clank somewhere off to his side. “What’s that?”

“Warm salt water.”

Luca moaned and buried his face in the cushion.

 

III

The stack of Greek composition notebooks heaped up on the corner of the desk was illuminated by a column of Monday afternoon sunlight that filtered in through threadbare linen curtains. Beside the notebooks, a sheaf of exam papers from the Aristophanes class had dried to a crinkly, coffee-stained mess. Luca lay flat on his stomach on top of the floursack quilt, squinting hatefully at the exams. It was time to try to get up. Crocetta had tidied up somewhat after the snatch squad, but there was a scar in the plaster beside the door where a chair had been knocked over, and more coffee stain on the unvarnished floorboards beneath the desk. He grabbed the brass bedpost and, holding his breath, dragged himself into a sitting position, still eyeing the notebooks. He let the breath out in a soft, strangled whistle.

Levering himself upright with the edge of the desk, he made unsteadily for the wardrobe in the far corner. He didn’t want to open it. Just inside, a mirror lay in wait to ambush him. He screwed up his eyes and wrenched the door open, then opened one eye. Most of the clothes were in still in a basket in a just-come-back-from-the-laundry muddle, but Crocetta had ironed an aubergine-colored shirt and left it hanging nicely. When, after a struggle, he got the shirt on and buttoned, he opened the other eye and took a careful, sidelong glance at the mirror. Besides a purple bruise under one eye and a thin, itchy red line across his throat where the captain’s sword had evidently cut him a little bit after all, his face was more or less as he had last seen it. The worst was well-hidden under his shirt, which was good, because he didn’t want to look at it, but buttoning his cuffs over the marks on his wrists had proved impossible. He swore again and stuffed his feet into his sandals, glaring darkly at the head of the staircase.

“You’re getting bread, cigarettes, and a newspaper, and then you’re grading those stupid Aristophanes exams,” he said to himself when a few minutes later he had finally reached the bottom of the stairs.

Crocetta’s grey head appeared round the kitchen doorjamb. “No, you’re not.”

“Yes. I am.”

There was the clatter of a latchkey and Nunzio Mandas, basement tenant of Crocetta Faruggia and professor of applied mathematics, pushed open the front door, bringing with him a piercing beam of sunlight, a faint smell of seawater, and a vast bundle of friarielli. “Brought the— oh good lord Luca.”

“I swear to God and each individual prophet, Zio, if you ask me if I’m all right I’ll sock you when I feel up to it.”

“You’re not going out?”

Luca reached for the door before Zio could shut it. “Yes. I am. Excuse me.”

When he had gone, Zio handed over the friarielli to Crocetta, who sighed and retreated into the kitchen. Zio followed her in.

“What’s going on?”

Crocetta, her back turned, pretended to concentrate on rinsing the greens. “You’ll have to ask him, if you’re stupid enough.”

“Like hell,” muttered Zio. “Did he write something again?”

Crocetta turned. “Unlike you intellectuals, I’m not stupid enough to ask. Turn on the radio before you go downstairs, will you?”

 

IV

At the edge of a dusty park where acacia trees and scraggly bougainvilleas vied half-heartedly for dominance, a ragged poster pasted to the side of a news kiosk proclaimed “Generalissima Delali maintains peace in our nation” in heavy white letters atop a fading, angular image of the generalissima treading on a scowling creature in a commissar cap. Luca stumbled stiffly across the street and grabbed the bottom of the kiosk window to steady himself.

“Good afternoon, Elias,” he mumbled. “The newspaper and a pack of Fortunas please.” He wanted to go home. A hooded crow cawed gratingly from the lone date palm in the center of the park. It was turning something shiny over in its talon.

Elias, not moving from his plastic lawn chair in the kiosk, craned his neck to stare at the rope burn and livid bruising ringing Luca’s wrists. He raised his right eyebrow. “They shouldn’t contradict themselves like this.”

“What?”

Elias passed across the day’s edition of the Popular Inquisitor and the cigarettes. “Consistency is all I ask. Well, consistency and—”

“Stop right there. They might ask me about you next time. Match?”

“Sure. Anyway you’ll see.” Elias tossed him a crushed cardboard matchbox and reached for the weeping glass of coffee on the plastic lawn table crammed in next to the tobacco rack. “Opinion page,” he sneered. “You’re not going to like it.”

“It’s on the opinion page. Look, Elias, don’t—”

“The whole neighborhood already knows, and I just saw you come out of the baker’s so I give it an hour or so before the whole island knows. Unofficially, of course. She mustn’t have thought of it until it was a bit too late.”

“I’m not precisely sure what you’re talking about, but the Poet Laureate did come in to tell Santini to cut it out, which I must say seemed uncharacteristic.”

“They took you to the harbor station?”

“The palace, actually, but her generality doesn’t like stains on the parquet so she sent me back.”

“I see. About what time was it they let you go?”

“I don’t know. It’s hard to see the clock through a blindfold, I find. I don’t know why they bother, honestly. It’s not as if I didn’t know where I was.”

“Yeah, but—”

“Probably around six yesterday morning? I had other things on my mind. Please look somewhere other than at my hands.”

Elias shook his head and looked up. “Sorry. I was just thinking.”

“Don’t do that either.” Luca balanced his loaf of bread atop the magazine rack and opened the newspaper. “All right, let’s see what I’m not going to like.”

“First letter,” said Elias.

_It was heartening to see a long-standing critic of his nation come around this week to a more patriotic viewpoint. In his most recent pamphlet, Dr. Alunni, professor of Greek and ancient history at our fine university, shows that rule by the popular will is more than the form of a nation's—_ There was certainly a special circle of hell reserved specifically for Roland Barthes in particular. He skipped down to the end. _Her Excellency Generalissima Phebe Delali, President-for-Life and Defender of the Republic._ “Son of a bitch.”

“I told you you wouldn’t like it. What are you going to do?”

Luca hurled the newspaper back at Elias. “I’m going to grade the Aristophanes final.”


	2. Antiquities

...sed revocare gradum superasque evadere ad auras, hoc opus, hic labor est.

Virgil, _Aeneid_ VI.128

 

I

The alleged motorcycle’s alleged kickstarter had given Luca little trouble for once, and now he was bumping along a crumbling road into the hills north of the city, towards a crossroads where a wooden sign proclaiming THOLOI in fresh red paint pointed a carven hand inland.It hurt, but no more so than anything else.Zio had been dropped at the university along with the Aristophanes finals and a note for the humanities department to the effect that he would distribute the composition examinations in person but was not to be expected back on campus until Friday.It did not say that he had a conscientious objection to being drafted to serve as a horrible warning, but now he wished it did.

“God damn you, Delali,” he muttered.

A few minutes later the road dead-ended into a gravel lot and Luca brought the motorcycle to a shuddering halt beside another red-painted sign marking a cluster of trailheads.From a post driven into the ground behind the sign, wooden hands pointed off into a trackless olive grove that faded in the distance into a leafy grey haze.

Luca set off down the second trail from the left, hands in his pockets in case he met any other wanderers, forcing himself to bend his knees normally.Before he had gone fifty meters the dirt track had narrowed until it was barely visible amid an ankle-deep tangle of some wispy-leafed plant studded with starry yellow blossoms.

After a while the thick groundcover gave way to grass and poppies running up beneath the walls of a lichen-encrusted cyclopean pile that almost vanished amongst the grey olives.The path wound up into the shadow of the structure and around the wall past a yawning corbel door.Luca didn’t look in: there would just be bare earth and the remains of illicit student picnics.

On the other side of the fortification the track plunged down a short slope through a thick stand of intertwined olive and oak trees and then out into a dell covered in a brilliant green carpet of short vegetation dotted with enigmatic stone remnants.Luca skirted wide around an oval basin ringed round by five ranks of eroded steps, like a hippodrome in miniature.On the far side of the dell, a narrow trapezoidal door capped by a monumental lintel yawned in the hillside.Inside, a narrow staircase mirrored by a stepped ceiling disappeared into the dark.The door exhaled a cool damp breath.

Luca braced a hand against each wall and started down the red limestone stairs, listening closely to the changing echo of his steps.

“Good god are you up already?”

Luca froze at the bottom of the stairs.“Farabi?Did you follow me out here?”A cold tingling spread across his shoulders and trickled down his back as he shrank away from the voice, which was slow and a bit nasal.He didn’t turn around.

“No.I’m not on duty until this afternoon.”

“Where were you?I didn’t see you.”

“Sitting under a tree just outside.”

“Why did you come here?”

“I like the flowers.Oh, I have another question.”

Luca suddenly felt like throwing up his coffee.“Do you.”

“Yes.Why is it that you talk a lot but don’t do much of anything?”

“I don’t see why I should dignify something that foolish with an answer.”

“You’re still rude but you don’t chatter nearly as much when nobody’s beating you.”

“Helplessness and pain bring out my worst impulses.” Luca took a few steps forward, stopping at the edge of the spring where black water lapped onto the ancient paving stones, soaking the soles of his sandals.“Μὴ κεύθετ᾽ ἔνδον καρδίας φόβῳ τινός. Τὸ μόρσιμον γὰρ τόν τ᾽ ἐλεύθερον μένει—”His droning whisper expanded to fill the dome, conjuring a muttering chorus out of the water and the stone walls. “—καὶ τὸν πρὸς ἄλλης δεσποτούμενον χερός.”

“What is κεύθω?”

Luca stepped back into the stairwell, steadying himself against the wall as he turned toward the voice.An imposing uniformed silhouette loomed for a moment against the sun, and then stepping forward it transformed into a man in a rumpled tunic, with his peaked cap sitting slightly too far back on his head.

“Κεύθω is ‘hide’.” 

“I thought that was κρύπτω.”

“It’s also κεύθω.Man is a redundant animal.”

“‘Do not hide your fear of anyone within your heart, for the same fate awaits the free man and the one oppressed by another’s hand’?That doesn’t seem right.”

“That’s because it isn’t.”Luca sighed and turned away.“It’s ‘Do not hide it within your heart for fear of anyone.’It refers to the previous line.”

“The antecedent being?”

“Enmity.Electra’s.Against Clytaemnestra.Weren’t you at all the Aeschylus classes?I seem to remember you distinctly, sitting in the back row with your boots on the desk, but it was before we met in your official capacity, so I could be mistaken.”

“I don’t think that’s in the Agamemnon.”

“No, you’re right.It’s Libation Bearers.Far be it from me to falsely accuse anyone of being inattentive in class.Excuse me.”

 

II

A mint-green butterfly had gotten into the day office.Her Excellency Generalissima Phebe Delali, President-for-Life and Savior of the Republic, was enjoying the discomfort of her secretary, who stood beside her desk torn between contradictory impulses towards protocol on the one hand and pest control on the other.She decided to have mercy.

“Leave the butterfly, Sciotti.I like it.It goes with the garlands in the murals.”

“Very well, ma’am.”He sounded disappointed.

“Per the American gangsters, we’ll make him an offer he can’t refuse.”

Sciotti looked over his shoulder at the butterfly again.It was failing to drink from one of the painted flowers in the sham Style III frescoes.“I don’t think I follow.”No one should ever have let her watch that movie.The censors could have fixed it.

“Remember when the classics faculty sent us a request for funding for our own translations so we can stop using Italian editions in the schools?”

“No ma’am.”She mustn’t be talking about the butterfly after all.

“Well they did.It seems to have been Alunni’s idea.I have the letter around here somewhere.”

“Oh, yes.I see.You know, I don’t think that will work.”

“What do you mean work?He doesn’t have to take the bait for it to work.”

“As you say, ma’am.”

Phebe put down the pen she had been rolling between her fingers.“Don’t take a tone, Sciotti, and write the classics faculty a nice letter.On the good paper, please.”

“Very well.”He turned back towards his own desk.

“I know it continues to shock you but I do know what I’m doing.”

Sciotti’s shoes clicked on the limestone tiles.“I don’t know what you’re doing, ma’am.”

“Go write the letter.”

“You could just shoot him.”

“I don’t want to shoot him.I like him.”

Sciotti shrugged.“Your funeral.You have a meeting with the finance committee scheduled over lunch today.The briefs are in the file you just set your teacup on.”

 

III

An hour later, Luca tottered into the kitchen and wound up face-to-face with an antique sheep skull that had been left on the table where a jar of flowers should have been.It had the warm brown patina of bone buried for millennia in the earth and a red-and-yellow marigold in each eye socket.Dr Delphers was back.He sighed.

A badly-rusted hinge creaked as Zio elbowed the back door open and rushed to deposit overflowing handfuls of purple carrots and fat magenta tomatoes on the counter beside the sink.“How was your historico-pastoral ramble?”

“Judge for yourself: I ran into the Poet Laureate.”

“He doesn’t crumble immediately in sunlight?”

“Evidently not.When did Annette get in?”

“Some time this morning.Went straight up to the dig site and I think she made for the beach as soon as she got back.I haven’t actually seen her, I’ve just seen the circumstantial evidence.”

“Truly Allah is merciful.”

“While Crocetta’s not here to yell at us, pirates or Algerian pirates?”

“Uh, Algerian pirates.”

Zio flicked on the radio and twiddled the dials until the static coalesced into jam band drumming and the soft piping of a flute.

“Got any idea what they’re saying?”

“Not this one. I think it’s in some Amazigh language.”

“Listen, I’m a fool and that bike ride was murder.Could you maybe go up to my room and get the composition books off the desk?And also the red pen from the jar, please.”

As soon as Zio had gone, Luca furtively rinsed a carrot in the sink and bit off the end with a crack.Zio came back to find him staring, mesmerized, at the purple and orange growth rings inside.He let the composition books thud to the table and Luca looked up sheepishly.

“Happy end of term,” said voice with a heavy Anglophone accent behind them.

Luca wanted to leap into the air and spin around but had to content himself instead with a flinch and a laborious maneuver involving the back of a kitchen chair.Zio made a slight movement towards the radio, but then seemed to change his mind.Dr Delphers stood leaning in the half-open back door in her usual state of dusty good cheer, faded Yankees hat in one hand and frayed Turkish towel in the other.

“Tell me that when I’ve graded the last final.How was your flight?”He set the carrot on the table and lowered himself carefully into a seat.

“Uneventful.And how have you been?”Dr Delphers was rocking back and forth gently on her heels, and it seemed to Luca that her habitual rabbity grin had gone a bit rigid.

“Well according to Roland Barthes I’m dead, but other than that I think I’m doing as well as can be expected.”

Dr. Delphers put on her hat to free up a hand and picked up the notebook on top of the stack.She paged through it, frowning.“What are these?”

Luca snatched the notebook back and opened it without looking.“Greek composition final.I made them write me essays on the Crito, for their sins and also for mine.”He looked down at the page in front of him.“My sins.Definitely my own.This wise-ass wrote in scriptio continua.”

“Which one’s Crito again?Plato, right?”Dr Delphers reached for a carrot.

“Yeah.Plato.Should I stay or should I go,” he added in English.

“Is that allowed?” asked Dr Delphers.

“Good god, and it’s boustrophedon.”Luca looked up from the offending page.“What, scriptio continua?Frankly it never occurred to me to forbid it.Or did you mean the Clash?”

Dr Delphers leaned against the doorjamb nibbling on her carrot.“I meant Crito.”

“Oh.Surely you don’t think that we’re told what we can and cannot teach?”

“Hm.”

“Besides, everyone knows classicists are notoriously reactionary.”

“Really?You should visit an American university some time.”

“I thought you’d gone to the beach,” said Zio.

Dr Delphers waggled the towel.“Left this.See you nerds at dinner.”

“Have fun,” Luca mumbled as the front door slammed behind her.He turned back to the meticulously squared-up stoichedon block capitals.That notorious corrupter of youth the paleographer was going to catch hell next time she dared set foot in the classics faculty commons.Conscious of looming, he looked up again.Zio had paused with his hand on the refrigerator door, both eyebrows slightly raised. “Yes?Is there something wrong?”

“I hate to tell you this now,” said Zio, “but you’ve bled through the back of your shirt.I think it must have been a while ago.It looks like it’s all dry.”

Luca’s face abruptly went slack.“How gauche of me.Did she see it?”

“I think it’s likely.   Even if she didn’t see that, she definitely saw your hands.”

“You can tell she desperately wants to know.It’s a cunning trap.If I tell her, I have to talk about it.If I don’t, I have to sit here while she speculates wildly.”

“Maybe she doesn’t.”

“Of course she does.That’s the whole point.Why else release someone with visible injuries?”Luca’s mouth twitched into a small, flat smile.“Having to walk around knowing everyone’s picturing it all in vivid detail is the inevitable flip side of being a dire warning for the children.”

Zio winced.“I— guilty.”

“It’s not you.You can’t help if the tyrant manipulates the monkey brain.”

“Perhaps not, but—”

“Not that it’s occurred to Delali in those terms, but I bet the Poet Laureate has thought of it.Did we get left any chores before Crocetta went wherever she’s gone?”

“I think she went to check the lobster pots.”Zio pointed at a scuffed blackboard in a plaster mock-rococo frame beside the door, where a list of ingredients was scrawled almost illegibly in thick purple sidewalk chalk.“Looks like we’re supposed to start a napoletana sauce for her.”

“That’s all you.I need to deal with young Boustrophedon here, but I’ll do my best to lend moral support.Pour us a glass of limonana, please, while you have the fridge open, so we don’t have to totter pathetically across the kitchen again.”

“You’re not going to go change?”

“God no.I’m not going out, Annette’s already seen it, and there are stairs.”

Zio slid a glass of something foaming and pale green across the table.“I thought you went to the hypogeum?”

“That was this morning, when I was young and foolish.”He pushed away the composition book and reached for the next one on the stack.“A thousand flea-ridden curses upon young Boustrophedon, and upon his oxen.Young Boustrophedon can wait.He is wasting my exceedingly valuable time.”

Zio fished in a canvas backpack hanging from a peg next to the back door.“These were in your box.”He threw a large yellow envelope and a heavy blue card onto the table and then sat down across from Luca with a heap of tomatoes and a pot.

Luca tore open the envelope and dumped a smaller envelope and a piece of blue card out onto the table.He picked up the card.“It just says ‘Timaeus’.Ominous.And this looks like official stationery.”

He held up the smaller envelope.The paper was creamy, and where the return address should have been there was an oak wreath enclosing a double-headed fasces.It was addressed in red-brown ink in Roman architectural capitals.

“I don’t like this.This looks like trouble.”

“I really don’t like that ink.” Zio’s nose wrinkled.“It’s kind of bloody.”

Luca worked the flap open carefully and unfolded a matching piece of paper.After a moment he tossed it to Zio.“Oh so now Delali wants translations of— well, everything, it sounds like, but we’re starting with Plato.Says she’s sick of the schools having to use Italian.I’m guessing the card means I’ve drawn the Timaeus.”

“Is this supposed to be some sort of strange olive branch?”Zio rattled the paper, frowning. 

“Note the absence of an opportunity to decline.”

“Yes.”

“Anyway no one offers the Timaeus to a drama scholar as an olive branch.It’s some kind of trick.”

Zio looked down into his half-diced tomatoes.

Unthinkingly Luca closed his right hand over his left wrist.He shuddered but didn’t let go.“A good thing isn’t bad just because Delali instigates it,” he whispered.

“You’re going to do it?”

“Zeina and I came up with this idea in the first place.On what grounds could I possibly refuse?”


End file.
